Meet the Hong Kong expat proving to be a thorn in HSBC’s side

On New Year’s Day last year Hong Kong politician Ted Hui was temporarily blinded by a riot officer who lifted his protective goggles to fire a stinging pepper spray into his eyes.

Days later the 38-year-old vowed to return to the frontlines of the pro-democracy movement, calling it his duty to hold the police accountable. He refused to hold back in the months that followed, dropping rotten plants and stink bombs during council sessions in protest against new laws which suppressed democracy in the city.

Now in exile in Britain, he is determined to hold another powerful organisation to account. London-listed HSBC.

“My determination comes from a feeling of being powerless,” says Hui from his new home in London, where his two young children have enjoyed seeing snow for the first time. “It’s the same kind of determination [with HSBC] - you have to defeat the powerlessness.”

Hui turned his anger towards HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, after it blocked him and his family from their savings in December following an order from Hong Kong police. He has since filled his days urging politicians and lawyers all over the world to help him fight the lender, which in his view should be pushing back on police requests to freeze the accounts of pro-democracy activists like him, or at least questioning them.

HSBC argues that it has to follow police orders in all of the markets it operates, but Hui isn’t satisfied with that defence. His resolve to make as much noise as possible is the bank’s latest PR nightmare.

His campaign has drawn further attention to the political tightrope HSBC is walking between China and the West. For many, the bank’s long battle to remain above the political fray in Hong Kong was decisively lost last year when it supported China’s controversial security law.

HSBC’s support for the crackdown resulted in a huge backlash from Western leaders, with ex-US secretary of state Mike Pompeo accusing it of “kowtowing” to Beijing. Yet HSBC is now freezing the accounts of pro-democracy Hong Kongers such as Hui.

“My aim is to make HSBC accountable not only in Hong Kong and in the UK but worldwide so they understand that the price they have to pay for assisting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will be very high,” he vows. “HSBC can never be an international bank by appeasing the CCP - be on freedom’s side or be a Chinese, local CCP bank.”

Hui’s fight is no longer about money. He says he managed to transfer the majority of his cash to a safe place as his accounts were briefly thawed, so can get by in London.

That has not made him any less angry. A HSBC customer his whole life, he says it never even crossed his mind that the bank would “compromise its clients rights” after it backed the security law last year. After facing early morning dawn raids and feeling like he was being stalked in the streets while living in Hong Kong, he wants to make sure international businesses do not contribute to the oppression of activists.

His case has already drawn global attention. An international coalition of more than 50 politicians including ex-Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith wrote to HSBC chairman Mark Tucker last week demanding answers.

Another group of MPs have called for Wimbledon to dump the bank as their official sponsor. One major HSBC investor backs Hui’s fight, agreeing that the bank’s board “are in ‘we are simply obeying orders’ mode”.

The foreign affairs committee grilled chief executive Noel Quinn about the matter for the first time last month, after Hui urged MPs to step in, during which Quinn repeated that he “cannot cherry pick which laws to follow” in markets the bank is in. As a company founded in the former British colony in 1865, he said bosses felt that the extended period of riots which led up to the security law had become “damaging not only to the economy but to the people”.

Quinn’s performance did not satisfy Hui. He is now weighing whether to make a formal complaint to regulators and is lobbying for sanctions against HSBC, “if not for the entity itself but the people who are involved in making the decisions to freeze people’s accounts”.

He says it is unlikely he will sue the bank - lawyers told him if he ever wanted to it would be best to do so in Hong Kong, where he faces at least nine criminal charges. Authorities froze his accounts because they said they were investigating whether he breached the security law or laundered money with a crowdfunding campaign. Hui said the money, raised to fund private cases against police, was in a lawyer’s account and not his.

Hui was among 15 pro-democracy politicians to resign from the Hong Kong legislature in November. The group quit in solidarity with four colleagues who were dismissed for being an apparent threat to national security. His subsequent escape to Europe was not planned. While he was on bail for criminal charges, two Danish friends invited him to a fake climate change conference to get him safely over to Denmark (“We say the Chinese Communist Party got cheated by two Danish boys,” one of the men, 25-year-old Thomas Rohden, told the Wall Street Journal last month).

Hui was not in on the idea until he landed, only deciding it was best not to go back to Hong Kong while there. Now in Britain, he still finds the decision a difficult one to grapple with. Apart from studying in Canada as a teenager, Hong Kong is where he has spent his whole life.

“It was an extremely heavy decision and a painful one. I still remember announcing it on social media, I burst into tears,” he recalls. “Knowing that I have to cut ties with all the things I love and the place I grew up, and also having been through all the street protests, being with all my comrades who were facing jail while I was overseas. I had a hard time accepting that. It’s heavy to see that they are all suffering.”

Hui believes many Hong Kong residents will flock to London and Manchester in the coming years, potentially replacing Toronto and Vancouver as the biggest Hong Kong communities overseas. He thinks there will be an exodus of families especially now controversial guidelines for schools mean that students as young as six will be taught about colluding with foreign forces as part of a new national security curriculum.

Around 5.4m Hong Kong residents are eligible to come to the UK under a new visa scheme, an escape route offered by the Government after it said the introduction of the security law meant Beijing had broken a binding deal agreed in 1997 – when Hong Kong was handed back to China – to guarantee the city’s freedoms until 2047.

Hui is not currently planning to apply for the visa, saying that for his international campaigning work he is likely to live a nomadic life. His ultimate wish is to go back to a free Hong Kong. He says he never thought he’d be in this position, living in exile and fighting one of the world’s largest banks.

“I didn’t think about having the need to leave Hong Kong permanently or having to go into exile when I first joined Hong Kong’s legislature four years ago, or even 10 years ago when I started my political career as a district councillor, I didn’t think of that at all,” he says. “We were not afraid of speaking out, we couldn’t ever imagine that we’d be in jail for speaking up for Hong Kong or for protesting. That’s something that was totally unimaginable. Things changed really rapidly.”

A spokesman for HSBC said: “We are unable to comment on individual cases. Like every bank, we have to operate within the law and legal frameworks of all the countries in which we operate. When we get a specific legal instruction by police authorities in Hong Kong, or anywhere else, to freeze the accounts of somebody under formal investigation, we have no choice but to comply.”